From the earliest days of our infancy we use feedback from the world around us for learning. No one tells us how to do this: it is a natural phenomenon—the key to our development. We act, the world around us responds, and we learn. If feedback stops, learning stops. Feedback is our friend and the most powerful of instructional forces. If the right pattern is followed, at the moment of receiving feedback a person is the most teachable.
As infants we receive constant feedback from an attentive world around us. We receive natural feedback from a material world and agentive feedback from fellow humans. Natural feedback is without mercy and implacable: the laws of nature are unforgiving. Feedback from humans may be judgmental, inadvertent, or nurturing, depending on the intentions and awareness of the giver, and it may be helpful or corrosive, depending on how it is received and interpreted by the learner. But how it is received is learned from how it has been given in the past. Feedback is not just cognitive: it is bathed in emotion as well.
Feedback has different names: “knowledge of results”, “outcome”, “correction”, even “discipline”. As humans we learn to use feedback deliberately as a means of controlling each others’ behavior. The primary purpose of feedback changes by this use from learning to manipulation. We learn to use feedback as a means of judging, correcting, and sorting: “you are better than…”, “you are worse than…”. The use of feedback becomes institutionalized and thoughtless in formal education, and the learning and growth value of feedback is often destroyed, except for those who excel or those who are strong.
The constructive uses of feedback are often ignored, and the art of giving nourishing feedback—which should be one of our most coveted skills—becomes routinized into an impersonal exchange of mostly negative, often terse messages and a potential source of contention and hardness—at the very least a source of negative self-judgments and an absence of rekindled hope and anticipation. The inspiring stories we hear about “the teacher who cared” is really an unspoken story about the tens of teachers who didn’t care—or who were perhaps thoughtless or overtaxed by their duties.
The learner who has received nourishing feedback is in a position to learn and to change. The moment of giving and receiving feedback is one of the most important in all of learning, but it is often the one where the teacher is most distracted, most overtaxed, and most unable to respond with the adaptive nurturing that could turn an inadequate performance by the learner into a triumph.
If our goal is improvement of learning—and even more important, improvement of the learner’s ability to self-teach and become a learner for life, then we must raise the importance of feedback in our calculations, cultivate the skills of feedback-giving, and organize our teaching procedures to place feedback in its position of central importance. When this occurs, teaching gives way to mentoring, and we become companions in learning rather than learning-masters. When we do this, self-direction in learners improves, and there is a positive anticipation associated with feedback occasions.
We can change the occasion of feedback from being punishing to being inspiring, or at least hope-building, even in an institutional setting.
1. We can make feedback the stimulus for a better effort rather than a summary judgment. This requires that we allow students to test themselves against the criterion more than once—even repeatedly. There should be an opportunity for learners to make the determination within themselves to improve. There should be room for agency to act toward self-directed change.
2. We can make the feedback we provide disciplined, fulsome, and encouraging. A few cryptic notes on a paper is not sufficient. Feedback can be principled and disciplined by an ontology-based feedback message structure. We know from experience that feedback messages are not unique. There are patterns—kinds of things that we say over and over. We should become aware of the patterns and master the construction of complete feedback. There are only a few basic elements to feedback, regardless of the specific content.
Contents of feedback might include: re-assertion of the expectation, identification of the location(s) and type(s) of error, hearing of the learner’s reasoning about the error, provision of models of adequacy and excellence at the learner’s level of understanding, solicitation of alternatives from the learner, commitment to a plan for subsequent action, affirmation of the learner’s determination, affirmation of the teacher’s confidence, etc.
3. We can make our standards and expectations more clear. We can provide models. We can be patient in giving re-explanations.
4. We can change our image of the learner and eliminate the automatic assumption of the learner’s guilt or improvidence. We can see learners as if they were infants with respect to the principles and theories we are teaching, because that is what they are. We can treat them with the same tender care we would give an infant, reserve negative judgment, and still hold high expectations of them.
5. We can construct grading systems in which there is room for choice and self-determination. Re-try should be possible.
6. We can take the threat and pressure out of receiving feedback. We can reduce the stresses and uncertainties that normally surround feedback encounters. We can exhibit respect toward the learner and use patient, personal attention to reaffirm our regard for the individual.
7. We can give learners the ability to track their own progress toward improvement as they are attempting improvement.
In short, we can become more Christ-like. By doing these things, we reclaim feedback as an instructional rather than a sorting technique and allow learners to use the feedback we provide in a self-directed and self-determined (and satisfying) learning process. We teach learners to be agents.
